SRHE Members must log-in to access member registration rates 

Overview

This 3-hour webinar will showcase research on virtual international student mobilities, i.e. forms of international student mobility where students enrol on online distance education programmes outside their home countries instead of physically travelling abroad. The first session will bring together papers focused on a range of national contexts, which will question the equality assumptions in virtual student mobilities, through highlighting existing ways that such mobilities are inherently unequal and potentially risk further marginalisation; examine the political economy of such internationalisation; and explore students’ experiences of educational mobility without movement. In the second session, we will hear research findings from an Open Research Area-funded project on virtual international student mobilities to the UK, France, and Canada. The session will focus on the policy rationales underpinning online distance learning provision in these three countries. Both sessions will include comments from discussants and Q&A.

Schedule

Speaker bios

Dr Ahmad Akkad is a Research Associate in the Department of Education at the University of Bath and an Honorary Research Fellow and College Advisor in the Department of Education at the University of Oxford. He is co-leading the Global Observatory on Academic Freedom (GOAF) at King’s College London (KCL). He is a Co-Convenor of the Diary Method Community and the Higher Education Research Group at KCL. Ahmad’s research interests span international higher education, particularly in conflict contexts, doctoral education, academic mobility, displacement, and diaspora.  Ahmad has taught on the MA Global Education and International Development at the University of Warwick and has lectured at Oxford, KCL, and in Syria. He has also collaborated with international organisations and charities, including UN-supported NGOs, to promote refugee education across Europe and in conflict-affected contexts.

Dr Aline Courtois is Reader in the Department of Education at the University of Bath, UK and co-editor of the Studies in Sociology of Education journal. She is a member of several research centres, including the Centre for Global Higher Education at Oxford. She is the author of Elite Schooling and Social Inequality. Privilege and Power in Ireland’s Top Private Schools (Palgrave, 2018), co-editor of The Future of Cross-Border Academic Mobility and Immobility. Power, Knowledge and Agency (Bloomsbury, 2025), and has published widely from her research on elite education; internationalisation and student mobility; and academic mobility and precarious work.

Prof. Jana Kleibert is an economic geographer at the University of Hamburg, interested in topics of globalisation and regional economic development, global production networks and global cities.

Dr Jenna Mittelmeier is a Senior Lecturer in International Education at the University of Manchester. Her research expertise focuses broadly on the internationalisation of higher education and more specifically on the treatment of international students. She is the lead co-editor of the recently published book Research with International Students: Critical Conceptual and Methodological Considerations. She also co-founded and is the lead organiser for the Research with International Students (RIS) network, and is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Global Higher Education.

Dr Jonathan Paris is a postdoctoral fellow in education at Université TÉLUQ (Canada). He is a member of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Research on Higher Education (LIRES) and the Interuniversity Research Centre on Teacher Education and the Teaching Profession (CRIFPE). His research focuses on developing an explanatory model of persistence among international students enrolled in distance higher education programs. He is also interested in teaching practices in higher education, particularly within digital and online learning environments. Through his work, he aims to better understand the factors that support student success and to inform the design of inclusive and effective pedagogical approaches in remote education contexts.

Dr Magali Ballatore is a Senior Lecturer (maitresse de conferences) in Sociology at the Université Aix-Marseille. She is researcher at Mesopolhis – UMR 7064, member of SFERE. Associate researcher at GIRSEF-UCL, Belgium – at CEREQ and at the Laboratory of Economics and Sociology of Work UMR 7317 CNRS. Her expertise lies in comparative education, with a specific focus on the confluence of education studies and migration studies. She has published a well-known book on Erasmus, and represented France on the Management Committee for the EU COST ACTION "European Network on International Student Mobility" for the period 2021-2025. She is also member of the UNI-T project. She possesses a deep understanding of European comparative analyses related to mobility, HE policies, and highly skilled migration. Concerning Virmobs project, with Valérie Erlich, she supervises and contributes to all tasks and activities at French level.

Dr Mariia Tishenina recently completed a PhD in Educational Research at Edge Hill University, UK, and brings over a decade of professional experience in international education. She holds an MSc in Comparative and International Education from the University of Oxford and an MSc in Fundamental and Applied Linguistics from Voronezh State University. Her research interests include the socio-cultural aspects of human action, students’ self-formation and subjectification, and the internationalisation and digital transformation of higher education.

Dr Mariya Ivancheva is a sociologist and anthropologist of higher education and labour at Strathclyde Institute of Education, whose research and engaged scholarship focuses on topics of labour in education and high-skilled sectors. Her most recent work addresses the questions how digitalisation, outsourcing and AI-driven automation are restructuring academic labour and identities; the implications of AI for intersectional and global inequalities; and the role of universities in responding large-scale political, urban and technological transformation. She is the author of the monograph The Alternative University: Lessons from Bolivarian Venezuela (Stanford UP 2025) and co-author of the edited collection Educating Otherwise: Contexts, Interventions and Radical Possibilities of Anthropological Learning (Berghahn 2026).

Dr Olivier Bégin-Caouette, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Comparative Higher Education in the Department of Administration and Foundations of Education at the Université de Montréal. He also holds the Canada Research Chair in Comparative and International Higher Education (CRC-ESCI). He is a co-founder and director of the Interdisciplinary Research Lab on Higher Education (LIRES) and an associate member of the Interuniversity Research Center on Science and Technology (CIRST). His research focuses on the interactions between higher education systems and their political, economic, social, and cultural contexts, as well as on the production of academic research and the internationalization of higher education.

Prof. Parvati Raghuram is Professor in Geography and Migration at the Open University. She has written widely on international student experiences, focusing on the political economy that underpins their learning experiences. She is interested in the geographies of skills and education and how this shapes mobility and immobility. She is Chair of the Executive Board of IMISCOE, the largest network of scholars in the field of migration and integration.

Dr Sazana Jayadeva is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Surrey. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Sociology and co-convenes the Society for Research into Higher Education's International Research and Researchers’ Network. She is also affiliated with the GIGA Institute of Asian Studies in Germany as an Associate Researcher. Her current research interests include online distance education and the virtual mobilities of international students, the migration infrastructures mediating international student mobility, and national higher education branding.

Dr Théotime Chabre is a postdoctoral in political sociology at Aix-Marseille University and a Fellow of the Institut Convergences Migration (Collège de France). Based on extensive fieldwork in Türkiye, Cyprus and Mauritius, his research examines how peripheral and contested territories become international destinations through the intersection of higher education, residential tourism, migration, and state-building. More broadly, he is interested in the governance of mobility, service industries dedicated to foreigners, and the production of "desirable" migrants in border territories. Since 2018, he has taught political science and international relations at Sciences Po Paris, Sciences Po Aix and Cote d'Azur University. He co-organises the seminar "Privilege Migrations" at EHESS since 2021. His current research investigates comparative dynamics of distance international higher education policies in France, the United-Kingdom and Canada.